Deloitte Digital streamlines creative process

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What do companies do when they don’t have physical products to sell? Why they sell experiences, of course. And that’s something Deloitte’s new digital division has been squarely focused on – with impressive results – since first launching in 2010.

Deloitte Digital is the cool, technology savvy teenager in the conservative Deloitte consultancy family. It’s essentially an ad agency in the traditional sense, but it has been able to bring the rest of Deloitte’s more established global organization, knowledge base and brand to bear for its multitude of clients.

The key for Deloitte Digital has been the use of an arsenal of digital tools, including social media, that has allowed it to seamlessly collaborate across the broader organization.

Deloitte Digital’s success in such a short period of time shows just how far an organization can go when it adopts a holistic, digitally focused, whole-enterprise approach.

Deloitte Digital is a creative digital consultancy and part of the larger Deloitte family of tax, audit and financial experts. Created less than 10 years ago, it is already the second largest digital agency in the U.S.

By combining creative and digital capabilities, and backed by the wealth of knowledge within its parent company, Deloitte Digital has been able to deliver the broad reach of a traditional advertising agency with the technical experience, deep business strategy, and relationships of one of the world’s largest consultancy.

The result is a $1.5 billion company that has shaken the traditional ad agency model to its core and is busy scooping up smaller firms to add to its own growing digital family.

But how has Deloitte Digital been able to so seamlessly integrate with its parent company, while busy blazing a trail of its own in a highly creative and competitive market?

The answer lies in large part in social media.

Bilal Jaffery, a Marketing Transformation Leader in Deloitte Digital’s Toronto office, says his group has been using a variety of social media tools to power this collaborative and client-focused approach.

“Social media has been the foundation for customer experience management across the organization. Leveraging social insights allows us to shape how we go to market as one Deloitte. It allows us to execute as one global firm.”

Most traditional ad agencies typically need to bring in creative , supply-chain and logistics people, inside and outside their organizations, and perhaps a consulting company as well, when working on a big project for a big client. That’s a lot of moving parts.

A key factor in its early and rapid rise has been the ability of Deloitte Digital to reach across the vast Deloitte landscape to bring together the knowledge experts and organizational buy-in to allow it to seamlessly deliver an exceptional experience to its clients that rival some of the world’s biggest and best ad agencies. And it’s doing so by staying true to the respected Deloitte brand.

Customers are increasingly using social media as their preferred channel of communication. To keep up, organizations must start thinking of social as a core component of the overall customer experience.

But with organizational structure still a significant barrier, with more than half of marketing organizations (51%) still constrained by traditional hierarchies that revolve around formal roles and levels, it hasn’t been easy to integrate social media uniformly across an organization.

For Deloitte Digital, the use of a variety of social media tools has provided different ways to connect and a wealth of data to analyze. And it has resulted in a more efficient and streamlined integration with the broader Deloitte organization.

“We use internal social networking and team collaboration tools like Yammer, Slack, and SharePoint, to connect and share assets,” Bilal adds. “We also use social media management platforms like Sprinklr to manage enterprise-wide social media use cases like brand awareness, corporate communications, crisis management and more.”

Lessons for Others

In its rapid rise in the world of digital creative agencies, Deloitte Digital has discovered the secret sauce to ensuring a seamless and successful integration with a larger, legacy platform. And it starts with social media.

Deloitte Digital is proof that organizations need to shift their focus from working on social media platforms in silos to developing a consistent and integrated content strategy that supports a cohesive digital and social strategy. Social media platforms should also enhance talent experience and knowledge-sharing, while driving more business integration.

By fully embracing all that social media has to offer across a massive global organization, Deloitte Digital has put the creative industry on notice. In this new world order, customer experience isn’t everything … it’s the only thing.